Wireless Insights: Sprint & T-Mobile Merger

With Mosaik’s wireless data and intelligence, companies are able to visualize and chart a course for their organization’s future in an increasingly mobile world. Our actionable insights provide roadmaps for telcos that translate into business decisions guiding them to forge new partnerships, shore up resources or turn competing companies into unified powers.

Since the earliest stirrings of a Sprint and T-Mobile merger, Mosaik’s team of researchers and GIS specialists have diligently studied our data to understand what’s driving these talks behind closed doors.

In the case of Sub-1 GHz spectrum, our data clearly shows that Sprint stands to gain much from merging with T-Mobile. We’ve developed spectrum maps to help our readers visualize how the spectrum holdings will intersect, giving Verizon and AT&T considerable competition moving forward.

Sprint Today

Sprint’s use of tri-band carrier aggregation in LTE Advanced allows it to take advantage of its total aggregate spectrum in many markets. Assuming the handset supports it, this technology allows carriers from all three of Sprint’s bands (800 MHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.5 GHz) to be combined to deliver significant bandwidth and capacity. While additional LTE Advanced technological innovations, like beamforming, allow for much better performance in the 2.5 GHz band, Sprint will still be at a disadvantage from a coverage standpoint. The bulk of their spectrum is in the higher frequency bands, with their only Sub-1 GHz presence being in the former SMR 800 MHz band.

Sprint can be very competitive with speeds and capacity in urban environments where their network has dense buildout. When it comes to outer suburban and rural areas, Sprint will require significantly more infrastructure to compete with others who own large swaths of Sub-1 GHz spectrum. This makes it difficult for them to come out on top in a mobile society where customers want to be able to depend on having coverage ubiquitously.

Sprint & T-Mobile’s Partnership

T-Mobile, on the hand, has ownership of significant Sub-1 GHz spectrum, and has already built out on a large portion of it. Since many handsets now being shipped can support multi-bands and beamforming technology, a combined Sprint and T-Mobile could well have the best of all the worlds – both significant Sub-1 GHz for coverage and in-building, and a stockpile of higher frequencies for urban, high capacity situations. Suddenly, a longstanding paradigm where Verizon and AT&T owned bragging rights for coverage footprint could be threatened.